This book studies the ongoing transition from an industrial to a creative (or post-industrial) society and how the creative society depends on a ‘soft infrastructure’ of individualist values and institutions. It explains this by looking first at the key actors in the creative society: creative individuals and entrepreneurial individuals, using insights from social and cognitive psychology and the economic theory of entrepreneurship. It shows how individual creativity and entrepreneurship are supported by both cultural individualism, based on the work of political scientists Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel, as well as political individualism, the principles of a democratic market economy guided by classical liberalism.
The book offers a number of policy implications that result from the connection of this multidisciplinary reconceptualization of individualism to economic creativity. It discusses a system of property rights that accommodates the creation of new property, ranging from the result of what we normally think of as product innovation to larger-scale innovations embodied in the formation of new lifestyle communities. It also considers examples such as universities that are more open to experimentation and more autonomous from government regulation, and a more liberal immigration policy that may result from the positive association between population diversity and creativity. This book is intended to support further interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research on the creative society (also known as post-industrialism, the postmodern society or the knowledge-based society). It will be of interest to academics and postgraduate students working in political economy, entrepreneurship, institutional economics, Austrian economics, and public policy.